Enterprise 2.0, when seen through the hypnotizing screen of the BlackBerry, does not amount to the liberation of corporate systems by personal systems but rather the colonization of personal systems by corporate systems. Society becomes a social network. My pocket vibrates, therefore I am.

Is open source much different? Or is it (through no fault of its own) making the art of writing software something that follows developers every day, all day (and night)? Liberating developers to scratch their own itches (but paying them to care about the itches of Company X) may well prove to be the way to turn them into mindless corporate-itching drones.

I don't think so, but I do think that Robbins' thought is troubling. Today open source offers a way to dramatically lower costs, increase customer-vendor alignment and intimacy, and rewrite the rules of software. But what happens when open source wins?

Open source being open source, one can always strip away unneeded features/code in an open-source project (as Barracuda has done with Linux, for example). So maybe open source is immune to its own success. Still, it's worth keeping in mind that success may lead open source to emulate the excesses of its proprietary cousins, especially on the commercial open-source side, as vendors seek to innovate to provide value for customers (so that said customers will pay them more money)...